LED signs

Has anyone here mucked with LED signs, the sort that display messages that typically scroll? I'd like to build something that includes one (basically it's an IRC-controllable office status displayer to help calm lost students) and local expertise would be a fun way to filter out the myriad of rubbish on the web.

Ideal for my purposes would be:

- USB, pretending to be a serial port (can be relaxed--USB-RS232 adapters are not a big deal)
- Documented protocol--I do not intend to run some crazy Windows thing
- Indoors
- About 20 characters

Am likely to drive it using a Bifferboard. A Raspberry Pi would add cachet, but I have only one f those and about 5 Bifferboards…

Unsure I'll be there on Tuesday but if so can talk about it with someone.

I have played about with the Shure LED boards connected to an Arduino. It's the 8 x 23 board as seen here. This is one on eBay, but there's lots of other sizes, colours and prices, and they can be daisy-chained to virtually whatever size you want.

There is a pretty good Arduino library that makes programming them quite simple. It can do scrolling text and all kinds of other clever stuff. The Arduino shows up as a serial port via the USB lead, and I'd imagine it would be pretty easy to get it to get it to display stuff as it receives it, or have pre-set messages triggered by short commands.

If you want, I can dig out the code I used, although to be honest, it's basically just the demo code that comes with the library just tweaked a little bit.